



Class _Xllj 

Book _J,__ 

CoKTi^M'N? 

coPHycHT Dsposm 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
SALES AGENTS 

NEW YORK: 

LEMCKE & BUECHNER 
30-32 West 27th Street 

LONDON: 

HUMPHREY MILFORD 
Amen Corner, E. C. 



THE 

PURPOSE OF HISTORY 



BY 



FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE 




COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1916 

All rights reserved 






\^\'^ 



Copyright, 1916, 
By Columbia Universitt Press. 



Printed from type, July, 1916. 



^/. 



Cri 



AUG 17 1916 



5CI.A438095 



NOTE 

This book contains three lectures deUvered at 
the University of North CaroUna on the McNair 
Foundation in March of the current year. It ex- 
presses certain conclusions about history to which 
I have been led by the study of the historjr of phi- 
losophy and by reflection on the work of contem- 
porary philosophers, especially Bergson, Dewey, 
and Santayana. 

I am happy to acknowledge my indebtedness 

to the Faculty and Students of the University 

of North Carolina for a most dehghtful visit 

at Chapel Hill. 

F. J. E. w. 

Columbia University 
IN THE City of New York 

JXTNE, 1916 



CONTENTS 

I. From History to Philosophy .... 1 

II. The Pluralism of History .... 27 

III. The Continuity of History .... 58 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 
I 

FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

The serious study of history is characteristic 
of a certain maturity of mind. For the intel- 
lectually young, the world is too new and attrac- 
tive to arouse in them a very absorbing interest 
in its past. Life is for them an adventure, and 
the world is a place for excursions and exper- 
iences. They care little about what men have 
done, but much about what they might do. 
History, to interest them, must be written as a 
romance which will fire their imagination, rather 
than as a philosophy which might make them 
wise. But maturity, somewhat disciplined and 
disillusioned, confirms the suspicion, which even 
youth entertains at times, that the world, while 
offering an opportunity, hedges the offer about [ 
with restrictions which must be understood and 
submitted to, if effort is to be crowned with 
success. The mature may thus become eager to 
understand life without ceasing to enjoy it. 

1 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

They may become philosophical and show their 
wisdom by a desire to sympathize with what 
men have done and to live rationally in the light 
of what is possible. They may study history, 
convinced that it enlarges their sympathies and 
promotes rational living. 

We might, therefore, conclude that the pre- 
vailing interest in historical studies is a sign that 
the age is growing in maturity and is seeking an 
outlook upon life which is both sane and encour- 
aging. This may well be true. But even if the 
study of history indicate a certain maturity of 
mind, it is not a guarantee that history will not 
be studied in the spirit of youth. History may 
do little more than afford a new world for wild 
adventure and undisciplined experience. More- 
over, maturity is not necessarily wise. Disgust, 
revolt, and loss of sympathy are not always 
strangers to it. Historical studies may be pur- 
sued with little comprehension of their aim or 
meaning; and history may be taught with little 
reflection on its philosophical significance. It 
would appear, therefore, that the study of 
history itself affords an opportunity for philo- 
sophical inquiry, and may profitably stimulate 
questions about the character of those facts with 
which history is concerned. 

2 / 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

In these lectures I intend to deal with the 
purpose of history. I would not, however, be 
misunderstood. My aim is not, by making 
another attempt to find the increasing purpose 
running through the ages, to win permanently 
the laurel which, hitherto, ambitious philosophers 
have worn only for a season. There is, no doubt, 
a kind of rapture in seeing history as St. Augus- 
tine saw it, — the progress of the City of God 
from earth to heaven; and there is a kind of 
pride not wholly ignoble, in seeing it as Hegel 
did, — the vibrating evolution from the brooding 
absolution of the East to the self-conscious 
freedom of one's own philosophy embraced and 
made universal by the civilizing energy of one's 
own state. My aim is more modest. It is not 
romantic, but technical. Metaphysics rather 
than poetry is to be my domain, although I 
cherish the hope that poetry may not, therefore;, 
be misprized. If it may ultimately appear, not 
only as an ornament to living, but also as an 
exemplary method of living well, I may even 
now invoke the Muses to my aid, but Clio first, 
and, afterwards. Calliope. It is my aim, through 
an examination of what the historian himself pro- 
poses, to discover in what sense the idea of pur- 
pose in history is appropriate, and to what ideas 

3 



y THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

we are led when we think of history as the record 
of human progress. 

The conclusions I hope to clarify, I may here 
anticipate. There is discoverable in history no 
purpose, if we mean by purpose some future 
event towards which the whole creation moves 
and which past and present events portend; but 
there is purpose in history, if we mean that 
the past is utilized as material for the progressive 
realization, at least by man, of what we call 
spiritual ends. More generally, history is itself 
essentially the utilization of the past for ends, 
ends not necessarily foreseen, but ends to come, 
so that every historical thing, when we view it 
retrospectively, has the appearance of a result 
which has been selected, and to which its ante- 
cedents are exclusively appropriate. In that 
sense purpose is discoverable in history. But 
this purpose is not single. History is pluralistic 
and implies a pluralistic philosophy. There are 
many histories, but no one of them exists to the 
prejudice of any other. And, finally, progress is 
not aptly conceived as an evolution from the past 
into the future. Evolution is, rather, only a 
name for historical continuity, and this con- 
tinuity itself is a fact to be investigated and not 
a theory which explains anything, or affords a 

4 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

standard of value. The past is not the cause or 
beginning of the present, but the effect and 
result of history; so that every historical thing 
leaves, as it were, its past behind it as the record 
of its life in time. Progress may mean material 
progress when we have in mind the improvement 
in efficiency of the instruments man uses to 
promote his well-being; it may mean rational 
progress when we have in mind the idealization 
of his natural impulses. Then he frames in his 
imagination ideal ends which he can intelli- 
gently pursue and which, through the attempt 
to realize them, justify his labors. Such are the 
conclusions I hope to clarify, and I shall begin 
by considering the purpose men entertain when 
they write histories. 

It is natural to quote Herodotus. The Father 
of History seems to have been conscious of his 
purpose and to have expressed it. We are told 
that he gave his history to the world ''in 
order that the things men have done might 
not in time be forgotten, and that the great and 
wonderful deeds of both Greeks and barbarians 
might not become unheard of, — this, and why 
they fought with one another." This statement 
seems to be, in principle, an adequate expres- 
sion of the purpose of writing histories, even if 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

Herodotus did not execute that purpose with 
fidehty. The Umitations of its specific terms are 
obvious. One might expect that the great deeds 
were mainly exploits at arms, that the history 
would be military, and that the causes exposed 
would be causes of war. But the history itself 
deals with geography and climate, with manners, 
customs, traditions, and institutions, fully as 
much as with heroes and battles. Professor 
Gilbert Murray says of it: ''His work is not 
only an account of a thrilling struggle, politically 
very important, and spiritually tremendous; 
it is also, more perhaps than any other known 
iDook, the expression of a whole man, the repre- 
sentation of all the world seen through the 
medium of one mind and in a particular per- 
spective. The world was at that time very 
interesting; and the one mind, while strongly 
individual, was one of the most comprehensive 
known to human records. Herodotus's whole 
method is highly subjective. He is too sympa- 
thetic to be consistently critical, or to remain 
cold towards the earnest superstitions of people 
about him: he shares from the outset their 
tendency to read the activity of a moral God in 
all the moving events of history. He is sanguine, 
sensitive, a lover of human nature, interested in 

6 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

details if they are vital to his story, oblivious of 
them if they are only facts and figures; he 
catches quickly the atmosphere of the society 
he moves in, and falls readily under the spell of 
great human influences, the solid impersonal 
Egyptian hierarchy or the dazzling chcle of 
great individuals at Athens; yet all the time 
shrewd, cool, gentle in judgment, deeply and 
unconsciously convinced of the weakness of 
human nature, the flaws of its heroism and the 
excusableness of its apparent villainy. His book 
bears for good and ill the stamp of this character 
and this profession." ^ 

^-^he history of Herodotus would, then, preserve 
a record of the world of human affairs as he 
discovered it and an exposition of the causes and 
conditions which have influenced human action. 
He would record what men have done in order 
that their deeds might be remembered and in 
order that they might be understood. Like all 
other historians he had his individual limitations, 
but for all of them he seems to have expressed 
the purpose of their inquiries. That purpose 
may be worked out in many different fields. 
We may have military history, political history, 

' Murray, Gilbert. "Ancient Greek Literature." D. Apple- 
ton & Co., 1908. Page 133. 

7 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

industrial history, economic history, religious 
history, the history of civilization, of education, 
and of philosophy, the history, indeed, of any 
human enterprise whatever. But always the 
purpose is the same, to preserve a faithful record 
and to promote the understanding of what has 
happened in the affairs of men. I need hardly 
add that, for the present, I am restricting his- 
tory to human history. Its wider signification 
will not be neglected, but I make the present 
limitation in order that through a consideration 
of the writing of human history, we may be led 
on to the conception of history in its more 
comprehensive form. 

To conceive the purpose of writing history 
adequately is not the same thing as to execute 
that purpose faithfully. If Herodotus may be 
cited in illustration of the adequate conception, 
he will hardly be cited by historians in illustra- 
tion of its faithful execution. They have com- 
plained of him from time to time ever since 
Thucydides first accused him of caring more 
about pleasing his readers than about telling the 
truth. He is blamed principally for his credulity 
and for his lack of criticism. Credulous he was 
and less critical than one could wish, but it is 
well to remember, in any just estimate of him, 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

that he was much less credulous and much more 
critical than we should naturally expect a man 
of his time to be. He wrote in an age when men 
generally believed spontaneously things which 
we, since we reflect, can not believe, and when 
it was more congenial to listen to a story than 
to indulge in the criticism of it. He frequently 
expresses disbelief of what he has been told and 
is often at great pains to verify what he has 
heard. With all his faults he remains among 
the extraordinary men. 

These faults, when they are sympathetically 
examined, indicate far less blemishes in the 
character of Herodotus than they do the prac- 
tical and moral difficulties which beset the 
faithful writing of all history. That is why he is 
so illustrative for our purpose. A faithful and 
true record is the first thing the historian desires, 
but it is a very difficult thing to obtain. Human 
testimon}^ even in the presence of searching cross- 
examination is notoriously fallible, and the dumb 
records of the past, with all their variations and 
contradictions, present a stolid indifference to 
our curiosity. The questions we ask of the dead, 
only we ourselves can answer. Herodotus wrote 
with these practical and moral difficulties at a 
maximum. We have learned systematically to 

9 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

combat them. There has grown up for our 
benefit an abundant Hterature which would 
instruct the historian how best to proceed. The 
methods of historians, their failures and successes, 
have been carefully studied with the result that 
we have an elaborate science of writing history 
which we call historiography. Therein one may 
learn how to estimate sources, deal with docu- 
ments, weigh evidence, detect causes, and be 
warned against the errors to which one is liable. 
Moreover, anthropology, archaeology, and psy- 
chology have come to the historian's aid to help 
him in keeping his path as clear and unobstructed 
as possible. In other words, history has become 
more easy and more difficult to write than it was 
in the days of Herodotus. The better under- 
standing of its difficulties and of the ways to 
meet them has made it more easy; but the 
widenmg of its scope has made it more difficult. 
We still face the contrast between the adequate 

.conception of the purpose of writing history and 

J;he faithful execution of that purpose. But it 
would seem that only practical and moral 
difficulties stand in the way of successful per- 
formance. Ideally, at least, a perfect history 
seems to be conceivable. 

It is, indeed, conceivable that with adequate 
10 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

data, with a wise and unbiased mind, and with a 
moderate supply of genius, an historian might 
faithfully record the events with which he deals, 
and make us understand how they happened. 
It is conceivable because it has in many cases 
been so closely approximated. Our standards 
of judgment and appraisement here are doubtless 
open to question by a skeptical mind. We may 
lack the evidence which would make our esti- 
mate conclusive. But what I mean is this: 
histories have been written which satisfy to a 
remarkable degree the spirit of inquiry. They 
present that finality and inevitability which 
mark the master mind. There are, in other 
words, authorities which few of us ever question. 
They have so succeeded, within their limitations, 
m producing the sense of adequacy, that their 
reputation seems to be secure. Their limitations 
have been physical, rather than moral or intel- 
lectual, so that the defects which mar their work 
are less their own than those of circumstance. 
They thus appear to be substantial witnesses 
that the only difficulties in the way of faithfully 
executing the purpose of writing historj'- are 
practical and moral — to get the adequate data, 
the wise and unbiased mind, and the moderate 
supply of genius. There are no other difficulties. 

11 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

Yet when we say that there are no other 
difficulties we may profitably bear in mind that 
Herodotus has been charged not only with being 
credulous and uncritical, but also with not telling 
the truth. At first this might not appear to 
indicate a new difficulty. For if Herodotus lied, 
his difficulty was moral. But it is not meant 
that Herodotus lied. It is meant rather that 
within his own limitations he did not, and 
possibly could not, give us the true picture of 
the times which he recorded. He saw things too 
near at hand to paint them in that perspective 
which truthfully reveals their proportions. His 
emphases, his lights and shadows, are such as an 
enlightened man of his time might display, but 
they are not the emphases, the lights and 
shadows which, as subsequent historians have 
proved, give us ancient Greece with its true 
shading. We understand his own age much 
better than he did because Grote and other 
moderns have revealed to us what Greece really 
was. But what, we may ask, was the real 
Greece? Who has written and who can write 
its true history? Grote 's reputation as an his- 
torian is secure, but his history has already been 
superseded in many important respects. We 
are told that, since its publication, ''a great 

12 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

change has come over our knowledge of Greek 
civilization." What then shall we say if neither 
Herodotus, who saw that civilization largely face 
to face, nor Grote, who portrays it after an 
exceptionally patient and thorough study of its 
records, supplemented by what he calls scientific 
criticism and a positive philosophy, has given us 
the real Greece? Clearly it looks as if the perfect 
history is yet to be written, and as if every 
attempt to write it pushes it forward into the 
future. And clearly we face, if not a new 
difficulty, a fact at least which is of funda- 
mental importance in the attempt to understand 
what history itself is. 

So Herodotus becomes again illustrative. His 
history once written and given to the world 
becomes itself an item in the history of Greece, 
making it necessary that the story be retold. 
In the face of a fact, at once so simple and so 
profound, how idle is the boast of the publisher 
who could say of the author of a recent life of 
Christ^ that she ''has reproduced the time of 
Christ, not as we would understand it, but as 
He himself saw it. She has told what He be- 
lieved and did, rather than what He is reported 
to have said. She has stripped Him of tradition 

^Austin, Mary. "The Man Jesus." Harper, 1915. 
13 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

and shown Him as He was; she has given to 
Hterature an imperishable figure, not of the wan 
Gahlean of the Middle Ages, but of the towering 
figure of all history." How idle, I repeat, is 
such a boast of finality when we know that 
this new history of Christ, instead of ending the 
matter, may cause another history to be written 
by some student who comes to the old record 
with a new insight and a new inspiration. It is 
possible, we may say, to portray the Christ of 
His own day, or the wan Galilean of the Middle 
Ages, or the figure which commands the atten- 
tion of the twentieth century, but the real 
Christ, the towering figure of all history, — who 
will portray that? It is yet to be done and done 
again. No historical fact can ever have its 
history fully written: and this, not because the 
adequate data, the wise and unbiased mind, and 
the moderate supply of genius are lacking, but 
because it is itself the producer of new history 
the more it is historically understood. It grows, 
it changes, it expands the more adequately we 
apparently grasp it. We seem never to be at 
the end of its career and we must stop abruptly 
with its history still unfinished. Others may 
take up our task, but they will end as we have 
ended. The history of nothing is complete. 

14 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

It is well-nigh impossible to avoid the suspi- 
cion of paradox in such statements as these. 
Yet I feel confident that every historical student 
keenly alive to his task is abundantly sensible 
of this truth. Where will he end the history of 
Greece or of Rome? What will be the final 
chapter of the French Revolution? No: there 
is no paradox here, but there is an ambiguity. 
For history is not only a record written to pre- 
serve memory and promote understanding, it is 
also a process in time. ''With us," Professor 
Flint writes, ''the word 'history,' like its equiv- 
alents in all modern languages, signifies either a 
form of literary composition or the appropriate 
subject or matter of such composition — either a 
narrative of events, or events which may be 
narrated. It is impossible to free the term of 
this doubleness and ambiguity of meaning. Nor 
is it, on the whole, to be desired. The advan- 
tages of having one term which may, with 
ordinary caution, be innocuously applied to two 
things so related, more than counterbalance the 
dangers involved in two things so distinct having 
the same name. The history of England which 
actually happened can not easily be confounded 
with the history of England written by Mr. 
Green; while by the latter being termed history 

15 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

as well as the former, we are reminded that it is 
an attempt to reproduce or represent the course 
of the former. Occasionally, however, the ambi- 
guity of the word gives rise to great confusion of 
thought and gross inaccuracy of speech. And 
this occurs most frequently, if not exclusively, 
just when men are trying and professing to 
think and speak with especial clearness and ex- 
actness regarding the signification of history — 
i.e., when they are labouring to define it. Since 
the word history has two very different mean- 
ings, it obviously can not have merely one def- 
inition. To define an order of facts and a form 
of literature in the same terms — to suppose 
that when either of them is defined the other 
is defined — is so absurd that one would prob- 
ably not believe it could be seriously done were 
it not so often done. But to do so has been the 
rule rather than the exception. The majority of 
so-called definitions of history are definitions only 
of the records of history. They relate to history 
as narrated and written, not to history as evolved 
and acted; in other words, although given as 
the only definitions of history needed, they do 
not apply to history itself, but merely to ac- 
counts of history. They may tell us what con- 
stitutes a book of history, but they can not tell us 

16 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

what the history is with which all books of his- 
tory are occupied. It is, however, with history 
in this latter sense that a student of the science or 
philosophy of history is mainly concerned." ^ 

It is because history is not only something 
''narrated and written," but also something 
"evolved and acted" that we are led to say that 
the history of nothing is complete. The narra- 
tive may begin and end where we please; and 
might conceivably, within its scope, be adequate. 
But the beginning and the end of the action are 
so interwoven with the whole time process that 
adequacy here becomes progressive. That is the 
fundamental reason why Grote's history sur- 
passes that of Herodotus in what we call his- 
torical truth. For the truth of history is a 
progressive truth to which the ages as they 
continue contribute. The truth for one time is 
not the truth for another, so that historical 
truth is something which lives and grows rather 
than something fixed to be ascertained once for 
all. To remember what has happened, and to 
understand it, carries us thus to the recognition 
that the writing of history is itself an historical 
process. It, too, is something "evolved and 

1 Flint, Robert. "History of the Philosophy of History." 
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1894. Page 5. 

17 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

acted." It is perennially fresh even if the events 
with which it deals are long since past and gone. 
The record may be final, but our understanding 
of what has been recorded can make no such 
claim. The accuracy of the record is not the 
truth of history. We are well assured, for in- 
stance, that the Greeks defeated the Persians at 
the battle of Marathon in 490 b.c. The record 
on that point is not seriously questionable, 
although we have to rely on documents which 
have had a precarious fortune. And, coming to 
our own day, we can have little doubt that the 
record of this greater Marathon of Europe will 
surpass all others in fulness and accuracy. There 
are, indeed, as Thucydides pointed out long ago, 
difficulties in the way of exactness even when 
we are dealing with contemporaneous events. 
"Eye-witnesses of the same events speak differ- 
ently as their memories or their sympathies vary." 
Such difficulties we have learned how to check 
until our records closely approach truth of fact. 
Consequently the records of what men have 
done, or may be doing, may be relatively unim- 
peachable. But it is quite a different matter to 
understand what they have done and are doing. 
Without that understanding, history is no better 
than a chronicle, a table of events, but not that 

18 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

"thing to possess and keep always" after which 
the historian aspires. 

To understand is not simply difficult, it is also 
endless. But this fact does not make it hopeless. 
The understanding of history grows by what it 
feeds on, enlarges itself with every fresh success, 
constantly reveals more to be understood. Our 
illustrations may serve us again. From the 
accessible records of the battle of Marathon we 
can understand with tolerable success the im- 
mediate antecedents and consequents of that 
great event. But in calling the event great we 
do not simply eulogize its participants. We 
indicate, rather, that its antecedents and con- 
sequents have been far-reaching and momentous, 
Greece, we say, was saved. But what are we to 
understand by that salvation? To answer we 
must write and rewrite her own history, the 
history of what she has been and is; and with 
every fresh writing the battle of Marathon 
becomes better understood. It becomes a differ- 
ent battle with a different truth. And more than 
this: with every rewriting we understand better 
what went before and w^hat followed after until 
the battle itself becomes but the symptom of 
deeper things. So, too, is it with Europe's 
present struggle. Already its history has begun 

19 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

with many volumes. Following the example of 
Thucydides in the Peloponnesian war, men are 
writing it contemporaneously by summers and 
winters. The consequences they can only guess 
at, but they have done much with the antece- 
dents, so much that the last fifty years of Europe 
are better understood than they were a year ago. 
The record of them has changed little; our 
understanding of them has changed much. It 
has changed so much that they have already 
become a different half-century from what they 
were. The truth about them last year is not the 
the truth about them to-day. Fifty years hence 
what will the truth about them be? 

I venture another illustration, one from the 
history of philosophy. I choose Plato. He is 
such a commanding figure that the desire to 
understand him is exceptionally keen.. The 
record of his life and of his conscious aims and 
purposes is very unsatisfactory. We have no 
assured authorities on these points. That is 
greatly to be regretted, because a correct record 
is naturally the best of aids towards a correct 
understanding. But the unsatisfactory record 
is not very material to the illustration in hand. 
The record might be correct, but Plato would, 
even so, remain an historical figure to be under- 

20 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

stood. He would continue to be the producer of 
what we call Platonism, and we should have to 
understand him as that producer. In that case, 
evidently, the details of his life, his span of years, 
his immediate aims and activities would involve 
but the beginning of an inquiry which would 
last as long as Plato is studied by those who 
would understand him. Who, then, would be 
the real Plato? The man about whom Aristotle 
wrote, or the man about whom Professor Paul 
Shorey writes? Undoubtedly the real Plato is 
the man about whom they both write, but that 
can mean only that he is the man about whom 
writers can write so diversely. He is not the 
same man to Professor Shorey that he was to 
Aristotle; and it is, consequently, a nice question 
which of the two disciples has given us the 
correct estimate of their master. Who was the 
real Plato? And that question could still be 
asked even if the Platonic tradition were in its 
record, what it is not, a continuous and uniformly 
accepted tradition. For it is quite evident that 
the Platonic tradition has grown from age to 
age as students of Plato have tried to under- 
stand him and to understand also what other 
students have understood about him. The true 
Plato is still the quest of Platonists. 

21 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

It seems clear, therefore, that historical truth, 
if we do not mean by that simply the truth of 
the records with which we deal, is something 
which can not be ascertained once for all. It 
is a living and dynamic truth. It is genuinely 
progressive. We may say that it. is like some- 
thing being worked out in the course of time, 
and something which the sequence of events 
progressively exposes or makes clear. If, there- 
fore, we declare that Herodotus, or any other 
historian, has not told the truth, and do not 
mean thereby that he has uttered falsehoods, we 
mean only that the truth has grown beyond him 
and his time. For his time it might well be that 
he told the truth sufficiently. Ancient Greece may 
then have been precisely what he said it was. 
To blame him for not telling us what ancient 
Greece is now, is to blame him irrationally. In 
the light of historical truth, the Father of History 
and all his children have been, not simply his- 
torians of times old and new, but also contributors 
to that truth and progressive revealers of it. If 
they have been faithful to their professed purpose 
of preserving the memory of what has happened 
and in making what has happened understood, 
they are not rivals in the possession of truth. 
They have all been associated in a common enter- 

22 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

prise, that of conserving the history of man in 
order that what that history is and what it 
implies may be progressively better known. 

History is therefore not simply the telling of 
what has happened; it is also and more pro- 
foundly the conserving of what has happened in 
order that its meaning may be grasped. A book 
of history differs radically from a museum of 
antiquities. In the museum, the past is pre- 
served, but it is a dead past, the flotsam and 
jetsam of the stream of time. It may afford 
material for history, and then it is quickened 
into life. In a book of history, the past lives. It 
is in a very genuine sense progressive. It grows 
and expands with every fresh study of it, because 
every fresh study of it puts it into a larger, a 
more comprehensive, and a new perspective, and 
makes its meaning ever clearer. The outcome 
of reflections like these is that history is con- 
stantly revealing something like an order or 
purpose in human affairs, a truth to which they 
are subject and which they express. History is, 
therefore, a career in time. That is why no 
historical item can be so placed and dated that 
the full truth of it is definitely prescribed and 
limited to that place and date. Conformably with 
the calendar and with geography we may be 

23 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

able to affirm that a given event was or is tak- 
ing place, but to tell what that event is in a 
manner which ensures understanding of it, is to 
write the history of its career in time as com- 
prehensively as it can be written. It is to con- 
serve that event, not as an isolated and detached 
specimen of historical fact, but as something 
alive which, as it continues to live, reveals more 
and more its connections in the ceaseless flow 
of history itself. 

The writer of history may, consequently, 
attain his purpose within the limits of the prac- 
tical and moral difficulties which beset it in 
either of two ways. He may give us the contem- 
poraneous understanding of what has happened 
in terms of the outlook and perspective of his 
own day, giving us a vision of what has gone 
before as an enlightened mind of his time might 
see it. His history might then be that of ancient 
peoples beheld in the new perspective into which 
they have now been placed. Could he, by 
miracle, recall the ancients back to life, they 
would doubtless fail to recognize their own his- 
tory, truthful as it might be. But comprehension 
might dawn upon them as they read, and they 
might exclaim: "These were the things we were 
really doing, but we did not know it at the time; 

24 



FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY 

we have discovered what we were; our history- 
has revealed to us ourselves." Or the historian, 
by the restrained exercise of his imagination, 
may give us what has happened in the perspec- 
tive of the time in which it happened, or in a 
perspective anterior to his own day. He may 
seek to recover the sense, so to speak, of past 
contemporaneity, transplanting us in imagination 
to days no longer ours and to waj^s of feeling 
and acting no longer presently familiar. Such 
a history would be less comprehensive and 
complete than the former. It would also be 
more difficult to write, because historical imag- 
ination of this kind is rare and also because it 
is not easy to divest the past of its present esti- 
mate. Yet the imagination has that power and 
enables us to live again in retrospect what others 
have lived before us. But in both cases the 
history would be an active conservation of 
events in time; it would reveal their truth, their 
meaning, and their purpose. 

If now we ask what may be this truth and 
•meaning, or in what sense may we appropriately 
speak of a purpose in history, we pass from 
history to philosophy. No longer shall we be 
concerned with the purpose of writing history, 
but rather with the character of the facts which 

25 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

stimulate that purpose and assist in its attain- 
ment. From history as the attempt to preserve 
memory and promote understanding we pass to 
history as a characteristic of natural processes. 
We shall try to analyze what the career of 
things in time involves; but we shall keep this 
career in mind in those aspects of it which bear 
most significantly upon the history of man. 



26 



II 

THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

History leads to philosophy when it raises in 
a fundamental way the question of truth. As 
we have seen, the term "truth," when applied 
to histor}', has a double meaning. It may mean 
that the record of what has happened is correct, 
and it may mean that the understanding of 
what has happened is correct. If the record is 
correct, its truth seems to be something fixed 
once for all and unchanging. The perfect record 
may never be possessed, but it seems to be 
ideally possible, because the events which the 
record would keep in memory must have hap- 
pened, and, therefore, might have been recorded 
if fortune had been favorable. If, however, the 
understanding of what has happened is correct, 
its truth can not be something fixed once for all. 
It is fixed only from time to time. One correct 
understanding of what has happened does not 
displace another as truth might displace error, 
but one supplements and enlarges another. 
Histories which have gone before are not undone 

27 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

by those that follow after. They are incorpo- 
rated into them in a very real way. Historical 
truth, therefore, when it does not mean simply 
the correctness of the records of history, is 
progressive. If the record of what has happened 
is correct, its truth is perpetual; if the under- 
standing of what has happened is correct, its 
truth is contemporaneous. Now what does this 
distinction involve? Does it involve merely the 
recognition that facts may remain unchanged 
while our knowledge of them grows? A suspicion, 
at least, has been created that it involves 
something more, namely, the recognition that the 
facts themselves, being something "evolved and 
acted," are also progressive. Historical facts are 
careers in time. It is their occurrence which is 
recorded and it is their career which is under- 
stood. We may, therefore, undertake an inquiry 
into the nature of facts like these. 

We may start from the distinction between 
facts and our knowledge of them, for it is clear 
that whatever the character of the facts may 
be, our knowledge of them, at least, is progressive. 
The past is dead and gone. It is something over 
and done with, so that any change in it is 
forever impossible. We should then, if we 
would be precise, say, not that it is the past 

28 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

which grows and enlarges, but only our knowl- 
edge of it. We recover and conserve it in memory 
and imagination only, and as we recover it more 
and more completely and relate it more and 
more successfully, we know and understand it 
better. Plato is dead, and not one feature, 
circumstance, or action of his life can now be 
changed. He lives only in the memory of man; 
and because he lives there and stimulates the 
imagination, there is born a Plato of the imagina- 
tion. There are thus two Platos, the one real 
and the other historical. The one lived and died 
long ago; the other still lives in human history. 
The real Plato has produced the historical Plato 
and affords a check upon historians in their 
representation of him. That representation may 
approach progressively nearer to what the real 
Plato was like, but it can never be the man who 
has passed away. History would be thus a 
branch of human knowledge, and grow with the 
growth of knowledge, while its objects remain 
unchanged. That is why history has constantly 
to be rewritten. Furthermore, in the rewriting, 
new types of history appear with new or altered 
emphases. The moral and religious type is sup- 
plemented by the political, and the political by 
the economic and social. For with the growth 

29 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

of knowledge the past looks different to us and 
we discover that what appeared once adequate 
has to be revised. 

We may admit, therefore, that history, what- 
ever else it may be, is at any rate a kind of 
human knowledge. Like all knowledge it leads 
us to recognize that there is a distinction between 
knowledge itself and its objects, and that the 
progressive character of knowledge indicates an 
approximation to an adequate representation of 
the objects and not changes in their own char- 
acter. This distinction in its application to 
history is evidently not a distinction between 
literature and its subject-matter. For the past, 
if we now take the past to be the proper subject- 
matter of written history, appears to have a 
twofold character. It is all that has happened 
precisely as it happened, and it is all that is 
remembered and known, precisely as it is remem- 
bered and known. There are, we may say, a 
real past and an historical past. The latter 
never is the former, but always a progressively 
more adequate representation of the former. 

Now this distinction between the real past and 
the historical past may be fruitful. It may also 
be treacherous, for the terms in which it is 
expressed are treacherous terms. For it is very 

30 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

easy to claim that the real past is after all only 
the historical past, because the past itself being 
dead and gone is now real only as it is preserved 
in history. Yet properly understood, the dis- 
tinction is essential to any philosophical com- 
prehension of what history is. It points out that 
history is not the past, but is its recovery and 
conservation. Events begin and end; men are 
born and die; events and men disappear into 
the past in a manner and an order which are 
unalterable. But it is not their disappearance 
which constitutes their existence in time a his- 
tory. Their historical existence is a kind of 
continuing life. It may be that it continues only 
in human knowledge, but, even so, it clearly 
illustrates the nature of history as a process in 
time. In other words the life of knowledge, of 
memory and imagination, is itself a continual 
recording of what has happened, a continual 
understanding of it, and a continual putting of 
it in a new and enlarged perspective. Here, too, 
within the narrow limits of man's perceiving and 
comprehending life to which we have now 
restricted history, events begin and end, men are 
born and die, and events and men disappear into 
the past in a manner and an order which are 
unalterable. Yet even as they disappear never 

31 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

to return in the precise and identical manner of 
their first existence, they are conserved, and 
continue the process of dying as occurrences in 
order to hve as a history. Yesterday as yester- 
day is gone forever. Its opportunities are over 
and its incidents dead. As an historical yester- 
day it lives as material for to-day's employment. 
It becomes an experience to profit by, a mistake 
to remedy, or a success to enjoy. History is 
thus the great destroyer and the great preserver. 
We must speak of it in apparent paradoxes. 
The child becomes a man only by ceasing to be 
a child; Plato becomes an historical figure only 
by dying; whatever happens is conserved only 
by being first destroyed. 

But the conservation of what happens is 
obviously not a perpetuation. History is not 
the staying of events, for time forbids that they 
stay. The conservation is rather a utilization, 
a kind of employment or working over of mate- 
rial. Through it discriminations and selections 
are made and connections discovered; the mov- 
ing panorama is converted into an order of events 
which can be understood, because consequences 
are seen in the light of their antecedents and 
antecedents are seen in the light of the con- 
sequences to which they lead. There is thus a 

32 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

genuine incorporation of what has happened into 
what does happen, of yesterday into to-day, so 
that yesterday becomes a vital part of to-day 
and finds its enlargement and fulfilment there. 
We can thus write our own biographies. It is 
possible for us to discover what mistakes we 
have made and what ends we have attained. 
Our history appears thus to be a utilization of 
material, a realization of ends, a movement with 
purpose in it. Selection is characteristic of it 
very profoundly. Other histories, of other men, 
of times, of peoples, of institutions, we -write in 
the same way because in the same way we dis- 
cover and understand what has happened in 
their case. Such a destroying, conserving, utiliz- 
ing, selective, and purposeful movement in time, 
history appears to be when we restrict it to the 
domain of human knowledge. 

It seems, however, idle so to restrict it. For 
other things besides our knowledge grow — 
animals and plants, and the stars even. They, 
too, have a history, and it may be that their 
history, being also an affair in time, is not unlike 
in character to our own growth in knowledge. 
Or perhaps it were even better to say that both 
they and our knowledge illustrate equally what 
history is, discovering time itself to be the great 

33 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

historian. All time-processes, that is, appear to 
be, when we attentively consider them, processes 
which supplement, complete, or transform what 
has gone before. They are active conservations 
and utilizations of the past as material. They 
save what has happened from being utterly 
destroyed, and, in saving it, complete and 
develop it. Time is, thus, constantly rounding 
out things, so to speak, or bringing them to 
some end or fulfilment. That is why we call its 
movement purposeful. 

Yet there have been philosophies which have 
tried to make of time a magical device by which 
man might represent to himself in succession 
that which in itself is never in succession. They 
picture his journey through life as a journey 
through space where all that he sees, one thing 
after another, comes successively into view like 
the houses on a street along which he may walk. 
But as the houses do not exist in succession, 
neither do the facts he discovers. They, too, 
come into view as he moves along. These phil- 
osophies, consequently, would have us think of 
a world in itself, absolute and complete, to 
which nothing can be added and from which 
nothing can be subtracted. It is somehow fixed 
and finished now; but our human experience, 

34 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

being incomplete and unfinished, gives to it the 
appearance of a process in time and discloses 
to us what it would be like if all its factors and 
the laws which hold them in perfect equilibrium 
were experienced in succession. History would 
thus be a kind of temporal revelation of the 
absolute and we should read it as we read a 
book, from cover to cover, discovering page by- 
page a story which is itself finished when we 
begin. 

Or philosophy, when it has not conceived the 
world to be thus finished and complete in 
itself and only appearing to us as a temporal 
revelation, has often thought of movements in 
time as only the results of preceding movements. 
Whatever happens is thus conceived to be the 
effect of what has already happened, rather 
than the active conservation and working over 
of what has already happened. The past is 
made the cause and producer of the present, so 
that the state of the world at any moment is 
only the result or outcome of what it was in the 
preceding moment. To-day is thought to be the 
effect of yesterday and the cause of to-morrow, 
and is thus but a transition from one day to 
another. Time-processes are thus robbed of any 
genuine activity or productivity, and time itself 

35 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

is made to be nothing but the sequential order 
in which events occur. Purpose, conservation, 
utiUzation, and all that active supplementing 
and working over of the past on which we have 
dwelt, become illusions when applied to the 
world at large. They represent our way of 
conceiving things, but not nature's way of doing 
things. 

But these philosophies, as Professor Bergson 
especially among recent philosophers has pointed 
out,^ gain whatever force they have principally 
from the fact that they think of time in terms of 
space. They picture it as a line already drawn, 
when they should picture it as a line in the 
process of being drawn. As already drawn, the 
line has a beginning, an end, and consequently, 
a middle point. Let us call the middle point the 
present. All the line to the left of that point 
we will call the past and all to the right of it the 
future. We thus behold time spatially with all 
its parts coexistent as the points on the line. 
Events are then conceived to move from the 
past through the present into the future, just 

1 See especially his " Donnees immediates de la conscience," 
1888. (Eng. tr. "Time and Free Will," by F. L. Pogson. The 
Macmillan Company, 1912.) "L'evolution creatrice," 1908. 
(Eng. tr. "Creative Evolution," by Arthur Mitchell. Henry 
Holt and Company, 1913.) 

36 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

as a pencil point may pass from the beginning 
of the hne through its middle point to the end. 
But, unlike the pencil point, they can not go 
backward. This fact gives us a characteristic 
by which we may distinguish time from space 
even if we have represented time spatially. The 
spatial order is reversible, the temporal is not. 
Time is like a line on which you can go forward, 
but on which you can not go backward. But 
you can go forward. Everything goes from the 
past to the future. The present is but the transi- 
tion point of their going. 

There are, undoubtedly, advantages in think- 
ing of time in this spatial way. Thereby we are 
able to make calendars and have a science of 
mechanics. It affords a basis for many successful 
predictions. But, quite evidently, time is neither 
such a line nor anything like it. Nothing what- 
ever goes from the past through the present into 
the future. We can not make such a statement 
inteUigible. For "to go" from the past to the 
future is not like going from New York to 
Boston. Boston is already there to go to, but 
the future is not anywhere to go to. And New 
York is there to leave, but the past is not any- 
where to leave. What then is this mysterious 
"going" if its starting-point and its end are 

37 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

both non-existent now? Clearly it is a "going" 
only in a metaphorical sense. We call it a 
"going" because we can so represent it by dates 
and places. We can say that here we have been 
going from Friday through Saturday to Sunday. 
But it is quite clear that to-day is neither past 
nor future, that it is neither yesterday nor to- 
morrow, and that if we go anywhere we must 
istart to-day. When Sunday comes, Saturday 
will be yesterday. But note now the strange 
;situation into which we have fallen — only in 
the future is this day ever in the past! And 
that is true of every day in the world's history. 
It becomes a past day only in its own future. 

Clearly then time is not like a line already 
drawn. It is more like a line in the drawing. 
You take the pencil and the line is left behind it 
as the pencil moves. New points are being con- 
stantly added to what has gone before. The 
line is being manufactured. Let us call so much 
of it as has now been drawn the past and that 
which has not yet been drawn the future. It is 
clear then that the present is not the middle 
point of the line nor any point whatever upon it, 
for all of the line that has been drawn belongs 
to the past and all the rest of it to the future. 
Its past has already been done; its future is not 

38 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

yet done, but only possible. Futhermore, it is 
clear that no point moves from the past into the 
future. Such a movement is unintelligible. If 
there is any movement of points at all, it is a 
movement into the past. That is, the line, 
instead of growing into the future, grows into 
the past — continually more and more of it is 
drawn. For remember that the future of the 
line is not the place on the paper or in the air 
which by and by the line may occupy. Its future 
is a genuine future, a possibility as yet nowhere 
realized. It is the part of the line which always 
will be, but never is ; or, better, it is that part of 
the line which will have a place and a date if 
the line continues to be drawn. The movement 
of time is thus not a movement from the past to 
the future, but from the possible to the actual, 
from what may be to what has been. The 
present is not the vanishing point between past 
and future; it is not, so to speak, in the same 
line or dimension with them. It is something 
quite different. It is all that we mean by activ- 
ity or eventuality. It is the concrete, definite, 
and effective transforming of the possible into 
the actual. It is the drawing of the line, but in 
no sense is it a part or point of the line itself. 
There are, doubtless, difficulties in thinking 
39 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

of time in this way, for it is not entirely free 
from spatial reminiscences. But it serves to 
point out that past, present, and future are not 
like parts of a whole into which an absolute or 
complete time is divided. They are more like 
derivatives of the time process itself in the 
concrete instances of its activity. They are 
what every growing or changing thing involves, 
whether it be the knowledge of man or the crust 
of the earth, for everything that grows or changes 
manufactures a past by realizing a future. It 
leaves behind it the record of what it has done 
conserved by memory or by nature, and in 
leaving that record behind constantly enlarges or 
transforms it. The growth moves in a manner 
and an order which when once performed are 
unalterable, but there is growth none the less. 
Since time is like this, it seems evidently unin- 
telligible to restrict it and history to human 
experience and make the world in itself absolute. 
It would be better to say that it is history in the 
large sense applicable to the world itself that 
makes human experience possible. Yet it would 
be more advisable not to make such a distinction 
at all, but to recognize that human experience 
is one kind of history, namely, history conscious 
of itself, the time process deliberately at work. 

40 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

Now it is evident that history in this latter 
sense is purposive and selective. That which has 
happened is not remembered as a whole or 
understood as a whole. Not only are details 
forgotten or neglected, but things and events 
otherwise important are omitted for the sake of 
securing emphasis and distinction among the 
things remembered. Herodotus spoke of "won- 
derful deeds" and others following this example 
have regarded history as concerned only with 
great men and great events. It is true that the 
little men and the little events tend to disappear, 
but we should remember that it is the selective 
character of history which makes them little. 
Speaking absolutely, we may say that no item, 
however apparently insignificant, is really insig- 
nificant in the historical development of any 
people or any institution, for in some measure 
every item is material to that development. 
But all are not equally material. The absence 
of any one of them might undoubtedly have 
changed the whole history, but given the pres- 
ence of them all, some are of greater significance 
than others. 

The history of the English people may be 
regarded as a development of personal liberty. 
It is doubtless more than that, but it is that. 

41 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

As such a development, it is evident that there 
are many things which an historian of personal 
liberty will disregard in order that the particular 
movement he is studying may be emphasized 
and distinguished. It will be that particular 
movement which will determine for him what is 
great and what little. So it comes about that 
histories are diversified even when they are 
histories of the same thing. There are many 
histories of England which differ from one 
another not only in accuracy, philosophical 
grasp, and brilliancy, but also in the purpose 
they discover England to be fulfilling. By 
purpose here is not meant a predestined end 
which England is bound to reach, but the fact 
that her history can be construed as a develop- 
ment of a specific kind. In other words her 
past can be understood only when it is seen to 
be relevant to some particular career which has 
its termination in her existing institutions. Her 
past has contributed through time to definite 
results which are now apparent. The things 
that have happened have not all contributed to 
these results in the same measure. Some have 
contributed more, some less. What is true in 
this illustration appears to be true generally. 
Every history is a particular career in the devel- 

42 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

opment of which some facts, persons, and events 
have been more significant than others, so that 
the termination of the career at any time is like 
an end that has been reached or a consequence 
to which its antecedents are peculiarly appro- 
priate. That is the sense in which history is 
purposeful and selective. 

The selection is twofold. First, there is selec- 
tion of the type of career, and secondly, there 
is selection of the items especially relevant to 
its progress. We may have the military, the 
political, the social, the industrial, the economic, 
or the religious history of England, for instance, 
and although these histories will overlap and 
involve one another, each of them will exhibit 
a career which is peculiar and distinct from its 
fellows. When reading the industrial history 
we shall not be reading the religious history. 
In the one we shall find circumstances and events 
recorded which we do not find in the other, be- 
cause all circumstances and events do not have 
significanoe equally for the development of 
industry and religion. Historical selection is, 
therefore, twofold, — the selection of a career 
to be depicted and of events and circumstances 
peculiarly relevant to that career. 

Is this selection, we may ask, only a device 
43 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

on the historian's part to facihtate our compre- 
hension, or is it a genuine characteristic of the 
time process itself? Does the historian read 
purpose into history or does he find it there? 
It may assist in answering such questions to 
observe that if selection is a device of the his- 
torian, it is one to which he is compelled. With- 
out it history is unintelligible. Unless we 
understand events and circumstances as con- 
tributing to a definite result and contributing 
in different measures, we do not understand 
them at all. The Magna Charta, the British 
Constitution, the Tower of London, the River 
Thames, the mines of Wales, the plays of 
Shakespeare — all these things and things like 
them are for us quite unintelligible if they 
illuminate no career or illustrate no specific 
movements to which they have particularly con- 
tributed. Selection is, consequently, not a device 
which the historian has invented; it is imposed 
upon him by his own purpose to preserve the 
memory and promote the understanding of what 
has happened. The procedure of the historian is 
not arbitrary, but necessary. It is imposed upon 
him by the character of the facts with which he 
deals. These facts are movements from the pos- 
sible to the actual and are helped and hindered 

44 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

by other such movements. An historical fact 
is not only spread out in space and exists equally 
with all its contemporaries at an assignable place 
in reference to them, it also persists in time, 
comes before and after other persisting facts, 
and persists along with others in a continuance 
equal to, or more or less than, theirs. In a 
figure we may say, facts march on in time, but 
not all at the same speed or with the same 
endurance; they help or impede one another's 
movement; they do not all reach the goal; 
some of them turn out to be leaders, others 
followers; their careers overlap and interfere; 
so that the result is a failure for some and a 
success for others. The march is their history. 

This is figure, but it looks like the fact. 
Simple illustrations may enforce it. The seeds 
which we buy and sow in the spring are not 
simply so many ounces of chemical substances. 
They are also so many possible histories or 
careers in time, so many days of growth, so 
much promise of fruit or flower. Each seed has 
its own peculiar history with its own peculiar 
career. The seeds are planted. Then in the 
course of time, soil and moisture and atmosphere 
and food operate in unequal ways in the devel- 
opment of each career. Each is furthered or 

45 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

hindered as events fall out. Some careers are 
cut short, others prosper. Everywhere there is 
selection. Everywhere there is adaptation of 
means to ends. The history of the garden can 
be written because there is a history there to 
write. 

Such an illustration can be generalized. Our 
world is indubitably a world in time. That 
means much more than the fact that its events 
can be placed in accordance with a map or 
dated in accordance with a calendar. It means 
that they are events in genuine careers, each 
with its own particular character and its own 
possibility of a future, like the seeds in the 
garden. Things with histories have not only 
structures in space and are, accordingly, related 
geometrically to one another; they have not 
only chemical structures and are thus analyzable 
into component parts; they have also structures 
in time. They are not now what they will be, 
but what they will be is always continuous 
with what they are, so that we must think of 
them stretched out, so to speak, in time as 
well as in space, or as being so many moments 
as well as so much volume. What they become, 
however, depends not only on their own time 
structures, but also on their interplay with one 

46 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

another. They are helped and hindered in their 
development. The results reached at any time 
are such as complete those which have gone 
before, for each career is the producer, but not 
the product of its past. 

It seems clear, therefore, that there is purpose 
in history. But "purpose" is a troublesome 
word. It connotes design, intention, foresight, 
as well as the converging of means upon a 
specific end. Only in the latter sense is it here 
used, but with this addition: the end is to 
be conceived not in terms of any goal ultimately 
reached, but in terms of the career of which it 
is the termination; and in this career, the pres- 
ent is continually adding to and completing the 
past. The growing seeds end each in its own 
specific flower or fruit. They are each of its own 
kind and named accordingly. It is only because 
each of them has its specific structure in time 
that their growth presents that convergence of 
means toward an end by which we distinguish 
them and for which we value them. In purpose 
construed in this way there is evidently no need 
of design or intention or foresight. In making a 
garden there is such need. The purposes of 
nature may be deliberately employed to attain 
the purposes of men. But apart from beings 

47 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

who foresee and plan there appears to be no 
evidence of intention in the world. When we 
speak of nature's designs, we speak figuratively, 
and impute to her rational and deliberate 
powers. But we can not clearly affirm that the 
rain falls in order that the garden may be 
watered, or that the eye was framed in 
order that we might see. The evidence for 
design of that character has been proved inade- 
quate again and again with everj^ careful exami- 
nation of it. To say, therefore, that nature is 
full of purpose does not mean that nature has 
been framed in accordance with some precon- 
ceived plan, but rather that nature is discovered 
to be an historical process, the conversion of 
the possible into the actual in such a way that 
there is conserved a progressive record of that 
conversion. 

From the selective character of history it 
follows that a single complete history of any- 
thing is impossible — certainly a single complete 
history of the world at large. History is plural- 
istic. This conclusion might be reached as 
others have already been reached by pointing 
out how it follows from the purpose of writing 
history, and how this purpose indicates the 
character of movements in time. Indeed this 

48 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

has already been done in pointing out that the 
history of England is its many histories and the 
history of a garden the history of its many seeds. 
Always there is a particular career and par- 
ticular incidents appropriate to it. Any career 
may be as comprehensive as desired, but the 
more inclusive it is the more restricted it be- 
comes. The history of Milton contains details 
which the history of English hterature will omit; 
and the history of the cosmos shrinks to nothing 
when we try to write it. The only universal 
history is the exposition of what history itself 
is, the time process stripped of all its variety 
and specific interests. Consequently, a single 
purpose is not discoverable; there are many pur- 
poses. When we try to reduce them all to some 
show of singleness we again do no mote than try 
to tell what a temporal order is like. It is 
metaphysics and not history we are writing. 

To affirm that history is pluralistic is, however, 
only to reaffirm the selective character of history 
generally. A history of the world in order to 
be single, definite, and coherent, must exhibit a 
single, definite, and coherent purpose or time 
process. That means, of course, that it is 
distinguished from other purposes equally single, 
definite, and coherent. There/ are thus many 

49 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

histories of the world distinguished from one 
another by the incidence of choice or emphasis. 
The flower in the crannied wall with its history 
fully recorded and understood would, conse- 
quently, illustrate the universe. All that has 
ever happened might be interpreted in illumina- 
tion of its career. Yet it would be absurd to 
maintain that either nature or Tennyson intended 
that the little flower should be exclusively illus- 
trative. The wall would do as well, or its 
crannies, or the poet. Nature exhibits no pref- 
erence either in the choice of a history or in the 
extent of its comprehensiveness. Man may be 
thought to be, and man is, an incident in the 
universe, and the universe may be thought to 
be, and the universe is, the theater of man's 
career. 

The same principle may be illustrated from 
human history exclusively. We who are of 
European ancestry and largely Anglo-Saxon by 
inheritance are pleased to write history as the 
development of our own civilization with its 
institutions, customs, and laws; and we regard 
China and Japan, for example, as incidental and 
contributory to our own continuation in time. 
Because our heritage is Christian we date all 
events from the birth of Christ. Yet we gain 

50 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

some wisdom by pausing to reflect how our 
procedure might impress an enhghtened his- 
torian from China or Japan. Would he begin 
with the cradle of European civilization, pass 
through Greece and Rome, and then from 
Europe to America, remarking that in 1852 a.d. 
Commodore Perry opened Japan to the world? 
Surely he would begin otherwise, and not unlike 
ourselves would construe the history of the 
world in a manner relevant to the progress of 
his own civilization. Europe and America and 
Christianity would contribute to that develop- 
ment, but would not constitute its essential or 
distinctively significant factors. The historian is 
himself an historical fact indicating a selection, 
a distinction, and an emphasis in the course of 
time. His history is naturally colored by that 
fact. Other histories he can write only with an 
effort at detachment from his own career. He 
must forget himself if he would understand 
others; but he must understand himself first, 
if he is successfully to forget what he is. He 
must know what history is, recognize its plural- 
istic character, and try to do it justice. 

To do justice to the pluralistic character of 
history is not, however, simply to write other 
histories than one's own with commendable 

51 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

impartiality. It is also to be keenly alive to the 
philosophical implications of this pluralism. The 
most significant of them is doubtless this: since 
philosophically considered history is a thing not 
written, but evolved and acted, to no one history 
can absolute superiority or preference be assigned. 
Absolutely considered the history of man can 
not claim preeminence over the history of the 
stars. He is no more the darling of the uni- 
verse than is the remotest nebula. It is just 
as intelligible and just as true to say that man 
exists as an illustration of stellar evolution as 
to say that the sun exists to divide light from 
darkness for the good of man. Absolutely 
considered the cosmos is impartial to its many 
histories. But even that is not well said, for 
it implies that the cosmos might be partial if it 
chose. We should rather say that there is no 
considering of history absolutely at all. For 
history is just the denial of absolute considera- 
tions. It is the affirmation of relative consider- 
ations, of considerations which are relative to a 
selected career. There is no other kind of history 
possible. 

The recognition of this fact does not, however, 
imply the futility of all history. It does not 
imply that any history is good enough for men 

52 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

since all histories are good enough for the cosmos. 
So to conclude is to disregard completely the 
implications of pluralism. If no history can 
claim absolute distinction, all histories are dis- 
tinguished, nevertheless, from one another. If 
no history can claim preeminence over any other, 
it is true also that none can be robbed by any 
other of its own distinction and character. The 
fact that the morning stars do not sing together 
is not the universe's estimate of the value of poetry. 
The fact that the rain falls equally upon the just 
and the unjust is evidence neither of the impar- 
tial dispensations of deity nor of the equal issue of 
vice and virtue. Each event in its own history 
and illustrative of its own career is the law. 

Yet men have been prone to write their own 
history as if it were something else than a human 
enterprise, as if it were something else than the 
history of humanity. Those who seek to read 
their destiny from the constellations ascendant 
at their birth are generally called superstitious; 
but those who seek to read it from the constitu- 
tion of matter, or from the mechanism of the 
physical world, or from the composition of 
chemical substances, although no less super- 
stitious, are too frequently called scientists. 
But ''dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt 

53 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

return" is an essential truth only about the 
history of dust; it is only an incidental truth 
about the history of man. One learns nothing 
peculiarly characteristic of humanity from it. 
It affords no measure of the appreciation of 
poetry, of the constitution of a state, or of the 
passion for happiness. Human history is human 
history only. The hopes and fears, the aspira- 
tions, the wisdom and the folly of man are to 
be understood only in the light of his career. 
They are to be understood in terms of that into 
which they may and do eventuate for him, by 
the way in which they are incorporated into 
his past to make it more fully remembered and 
more adequately understood, and by the way 
they are used for his future to make his past 
more satisfactory to remember and more satisfy- 
ing to understand. 

Yet some there are who stop worshipping the 
•stars when they discover that the stars neither 
ask for worship nor respond to it, and who dis- 
miss reverence and piety when they discover that 
a god did not create the world. Perhaps they 
should not worship the stars nor believe in God, 
but neither astronomy nor geology affords good 
reasons for putting an end to human reverence 
and faith. If the stars have not begged man to 

54 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

worship them, he has begged them to be an 
inspiration to a steadfast purpose. It is in his 
history, not in theirs, that they have been 
divine. How stupid of him therefore, and how 
traitorous to his own history, if he shames his ca- 
pacity for reverence, when once he has found that 
the stars have a different history from his own. 
The inevitable failure of astronomy and 
geology to afford man gods suitable for his 
worship is not a recommendation that he should 
vigorously embrace the superstitions of his 
ancestors. To counsel that would be an infamy 
equal to that which has just been condemned. 
The counsel is rather that what is not human 
should not be taken as the standard and measure 
of what is human. Human history can not be 
wholly resolved into physical processes nor the 
enterprises of men be construed solely as the 
by-product of material forces. Such resolution of 
it appears to be unwarranted in view of the 
conclusions to which a consideration of what 
history is, leads. The obverse error has long 
since been sufficiently condenmed. We have 
been warned often enough that water does not 
seek its own level or nature abhor a vacuum. 
Even literary criticism warns us against the 
pathetic fallacy. But in refusing to anthropo- 

55 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

morphize matter, we ought not to be led 
to materialize man. We should rather be led to 
recognize that the reasons which condemn 
anthropomorphic science are precisely the reasons 
which commend humanistic philosophy. It is 
just because history is pluralistic that it is 
unpardonable to confound different histories 
with one another. So we may conclude that the 
pluralism of history which makes all histories, 
when absolutely considered, of equal rank and of 
indifferent importance, does not rob them, 
therefore, of their specific characters, nor make 
human history a presumptuous enterprise for 
them that write it not in the language of nature, 
but in the language of man. 

This conclusion needs greater refinement of 
statement if it is to be freed from ambiguity. 
For the distinction between nature and man is 
an artifice. It is not a distinction which 
philosophy can ultimately justify. Undoubtedly 
man is a part or instance of nature, governed 
by nature's laws and intimately involved in her 
processes. But he is so governed and involved 
not as matter without imagination, but as a 
being whose distinction is the historical exercise 
of his intelligence. Nature is not what she 
would be without him and that is why his his- 

56 



THE PLURALISM OF HISTORY 

tory can never be remembered or understood 
if he is forgotten. He can not be taken out of 
nature and nature be then called upon to explain 
him. As a part or instance of nature man is to 
be remembered and understood, but as the part 
or instance which he himself is, and not another. 
His history, consequently, can never be ade- 
quately written solely in terms of physics or 
chemistry, or even of biology; it must be written 
also in terms of aspiration. 

All time processes are histories, but man only 
is the writer of them, so that historical com- 
prehension becomes the significant trait of human 
history. To live in the light of a past remem- 
bered and understood is to live, not the life of 
instinct and emotion, but the life of intelligence. 
It is to see how means converge upon ends, and 
so to discover means for the attainment of ends 
desired. Human history becomes thus the rec- 
ord of human progress. From it we may learn 
how that progress is to be defined and so dis- 
cover the purpose of man in history. For him 
the study of his own history is his congenial 
task to which all his knowledge of other histories 
is contributory; and for him the conscious, 
reflective, and intelligent living of his own history 
is his congenial purpose. 

57 



\ 



III 

THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

Although history is pluralistic, it is not, 
therefore, discontinuous. We can not divide it 
in two in such a manner that its parts will be 
wholly unconnected. Any division we may make, 
although we make it as plain as the fence which 
divides a field, gives us a boundary which, like 
the fence, belongs equally to the parts on either 
side of it. Novelty and distinction may abound 1 
in the world, but nothing is so novel or distinct ! 
that it is wholly cut off from antecedents and 
consequences of some sort. It is this fact which 
we denote when we speak of the continuity of 
history. We indicate that every action of time, 
every conversion of the possible into the actual, 
is intimately woven into the order of events and 
finds there a definite place and definite connec- : 
tions. Consequently it becomes easy to represent 
the movement of history as a kind of progress 
from earlier to later things, from ancestors to 
descendants, or from the original or primitive to 
the derived. If, however, progress is to mean 

58 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

anything more than just this representation of 
historical continuity, if, for example, it is to 
mean, besides a progression from the earlier to 
the later, some improvement also, clearly a 
criterion is necessary, by which progress may 
be judged and estimated. An inquiry is thus 
suggested into the continuity of history to see 
in what sense progress may be affirmed of it and 
by what criteria that affirmation may be war- 
ranted. As a preliminary to this inquiry it is 
advisable to envisage the continuity itself and 
determine how far it assists in understanding 
what has happened. 

From among the many illustrations which 
might be cited to bring the fact of historical 
continuity visibly before us, these from Pro- 
fessor Tylor's "Primitive Culture" are partic- 
ularly suggestive because they deal with familiar 
things: "Progress, degradation, survival, mod- 
ification, are all modes of the connection that 
binds together the complex network of civiliza- 
tion. It needs but a glance into the trivial 
details of our own daily life to set us thinking 
how far we are really its originators, and how 
far but the transmitters and modifiers of the 
results of long past ages. Looking round the 
rooms we live in, we may try here how far he 

59 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

who knows only his own time can be capable of 
rightly comprehending even that. Here is the 
honeysuckle of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis of 
Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs round 
the ceiling, the style of Louis XIV and its 
parent the Renaissance share the looking-glass 
between them. Transformed, shifted, or muti- 
lated, such elements of art still carry their 
history plainly stamped upon them; and if the 
history yet farther behind is less easy to read, we 
are not to say that because we can not clearly 
discern it there is therefore no history there. 
It is thus even with the fashion of the clothes 
men wear. The ridiculous little tails of the 
German postilion's coat show of themselves how 
they came to dwindle to such absurd rudiments; 
but the English clergyman's bands no longer so 
convey their history to the eye, and look unac- 
countable enough till one has seen the inter- 
mediate stages through which they came down 
from the more serviceable wide collars, such as 
Milton wears in his portrait, and which gave 
their name to the 'band-box' they used to be 
kept in. In fact, the books of costume, showing 
how one garment grew or shrank by gradual 
stages and passed into another, illustrate with 
much force and clearness the nature of the change 

60 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

and growth, revival and deca}^, which go on from 
year to year in more important matters of hfe. 
In books, again, we see each writer not for and 
b}^ himself, but occupying his proper place in 
history; we look through, each philosopher, 
mathematician, chemist, poet, into the back- 
ground of his education, — through Leibnitz 
into Descartes, through Dalton into Priestly, 
through Milton into Homer. 

'''Man,' said Wilhelm von Humboldt, 'ever 
connects on from what lies at hand (der Mensch 
kniipft immer an Vorhandenes an).' The notion 
of the continuitj^ of civilization contained in 
this maxim is no barren philosophic principle, 
but is at once made practical by the consider- 
ation that they who wish to understand their 
own lives ought to know the stages through 
which their opinions and habits have become 
what they are. Auguste Comte scarcely over- 
stated the necessity of this study of development, 
when he declared at the beginning of his 'Posi- 
tive Philosophy' that 'no conception can be 
understood except through its history,' and his 
phrase will bear extension to culture at large. 
To expect to look modern life in the face and 
comprehend it by mere inspection, is a philoso- 
phy whose weakness can easily be tested. Im- 

61 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

agine any one explaining the trivial saying, 'a 
little bird told me,' without knowing of the old 
belief in the language of birds and beasts, to 
which Dr. Dasent in the introduction to the 
Norse Tales, so reasonably traces its origin. To 
ingenious attempts at explaining by the light 
of reason things which want the light of history 
to show their meaning, much of the learned 
nonsense of the world has indeed been due." ^ 

The illustrations are drawn from the domain 
of human interests. They could be paralleled 
by others drawn from natural history. The 
honeysuckle may carry us elsewhere than to 
Assyria, revealing unsuspected kinships in the 
world of plants. Biology has made the con- 
ception of the continuity of living forms a 
familiar commonplace, and geology can find in 
the earth's crust the story of countless years. 
So familiar has the idea of continuity become 
that terms like ''evolution" and "development" 
have ceased to be technical and have become 
terms of common speech. We speak readily of 
the evolution of man, of government, of the 
steam-engine, of the automobile, and of the atom. 
The idea has so possessed all departments of 

1 Tylor, Edward B. "Primitive Culture." Henry Holt & Co., 
1889. Vol, I, pages 17 ff. 

62 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

inquiry that a large part of the Hterature of 
every subject is occupied with setting forth 
connections which have gone before. Not only 
do we go through Milton into Homer, but 
through yesterday into an ever receding past 
which grows more alluring the more it recedes. 
The quest for origins has been of absorbing 
interest. It would seem that we can never 
understand anything at all until we have dis- 
covered its origin in something which pre- 
ceded it. 

In the first lecture I pointed out how im- 
possible it appears ever to end any history 
finally. We now seem to face a corresponding 
impossibility, namely, the impossibility of ever 
really beginning it successfully. It would appear 
that we stop only because we do not care to go 
farther, or lack the means to do so, and not 
because we can say that we have found a first 
beginning with no antecedents before it. We 
may begin the history of philosophy with the 
Greeks, with Thales of Miletus, but the question 
has been repeatedly asked. Was not Thales a 
Semite? Did he not derive his ideas from Egypt 
and Babylonia? And whence came philosophy 
itself? Was it not the offspring of religion which 
preceded it, so that, before we begin its history, 

63 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

we must pass, as Professor Cornford suggests,^ 
from religion to philosophy? Then what of 
religion itself? What were its antecedents and 
whence was its descent? So the questions 
multiply interminably until we must admit that 
''in the beginning" is a time arbitrarily fixed or 
only relatively determined. History, being con- 
tinuous, has neither beginning nor end. 

This fact, however, ought not to bewilder any 
one who contemplates it steadily. It is an 
obvious consequence of the nature of time, for 
every present has a past and a future, and a 
first or last present is, consequently, quite unin- 
telligible. The historian, least of all, should be 
bewildered. If he has recognized that history 
is pluralistic, he will recognize also that begin- 
nings and ends are, in any intelligible sense, the 
termini of distinctions. There is not an absolute 
first or last in history taken as a whole, for, as 
we have seen, the attempt to take history as a 
whole, if it has any meaning at all, means the 
attempt to define history. It gives us the meta- 
physics of time, but not an absolute, complete, 
and finished whole, whose boundaries, although 
never empirically reached, are ideally conceivable. 

1 Cornford, Francis M. "From Religion to Philosophy." 
Longmans, Green & Co., 1912. 

64 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

Our thinking moves in a direction quite different. 
It leads us to observe that distinctions begin and 
end, and begin and end as absolutely as one 
chooses, but do not, thereby, cut themselves off 
from all connections. These lectures began to 
be delivered last Friday, but not the day before; 
the first word of them was written at a per- 
fectly definite time and place which can never 
be changed; they will end with a definiteness 
equally precise; but these beginnings and endings 
destroy no continuity. Every history is equally 
continuous, undisturbed by its beginnings and 
endings. Each action of time is preceded and 
followed by everything which precedes and 
follows it, and yet each action of time begins 
and ends with its own peculiar and individual 
precision. In affirming this we are affirming, 
by means of a particular instance, the meta- 
physical nature of continuity itself. For by 
continuity we mean the possibility of precise 
and definite distinctions. The continuity of a 
line may be divided at its middle point. It is 
then precisely divided, but is not, thereby, 
broken into two separate lines. ^ After this 

1 See Dedekind, Richard. "Continuity and Irrational 
Numbers," in "Essays on the Theory of numbers." Tr. by 
Wooster VV. Beman. Open Court Pubhsliing Co., 1901. 

65 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

manner the continuity of history is to be con- 
ceived. And in the hght of this conception 
we should understand what the continuity of 
history can explain. 

It is tempting to say that it can explain noth- 
ing at all, but it is evident that there is an uncer- 
tainty of meaning in such a claim. For things 
may be explained or made clear in a variety of 
ways with little resemblance to one another. 
What we mean by a circle may be made clear 
by defining a circle, or by an algebraical formula, 
or by drawing a circle. All these ways will be 
fruitful, but they will be fruitful relatively to the 
problem which provokes them. To explain 
anything at all, it is necessary to keep in mind 
the questions to which the proposed explanation 
is relevant. If I am asked to draw a circle 
it will not do simply to define it; and if I am 
asked to tell what it is algebraically, it will not 
do simply to draw it. So it is apparent that, 
when we wish to know what the continuity of 
history can explain, or when we affirm that it 
explains nothing, we should have in mind, first 
of all, the questions to which the continuity of 
history would be an appropriate answer. There 
appears to be only one such question, and that 
is, What have been the antecedents of any 

66 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

given fact? These antecedents the continuity of 
history explains in that it makes them clear. 
It may also make clear what the consequences 
of a given fact have been or may be. But this 
explanatory value is a derivative of the preced- 
ing or an enlargement of it, through our habit 
of looking at consequences as derived from their 
antecedents, and of basing our expectations of 
what may happen upon our observations of 
what has happened. Further explanatory value 
in the continuity of history it seems difficult to 
find, even if we make the statement of it less 
general and more precise. 

But in saying this, it is not implied that this 
value is mean or inconsiderable. The continuity 
of history is both entertaining and instructive. 
It is entertaining because it reveals unsuspected 
kinships and alluring connections. It is instruc- 
tive because it furnishes a foundation for infer- 
ence and practice. To man it gives the long 
experience of his race to enjoy and profit by. 
It guides his expectations and enhances the 
control of his own affairs. It is the same with 
the continuities of nature generally. They beget 
the vision of an ordered world and help to 
frame rules which are applicable in the control 
of nature. Accordingly it is not disparagement 

67 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

which is here intended, but a Umitation which 
should be appreciated. 

When we say to our children, ''A little bird 
told me," both we and our children may be 
quite ignorant of Dr. Dasent's introduction to 
the Norse Tales. We may be quite unconscious 
that we are using an expression traceable to a 
time when people believed in such language of 
birds and beasts as gifted persons could under- 
stand. It may be that we repeat the words 
simply because we remember that our parents 
once successfully deceived us in our childhood by 
using them, and that our parents did but follow 
the example of theirs. But evidently we should 
not explain the trivial saying simply by follow- 
ing it back endlessly into antiquity unless we 
concluded that it had always been characteristic 
of parents to deceive children in this manner. 
In that case we should have discovered a meta- 
physical truth about the nature of parents, and 
no further explanation would be required. 

If, however, we are not willing to admit that 
parents are such by nature that they will cite 
birds as sources of information when it is expedi- 
ent to keep the real source hidden, but insist 
that this habit be otherwise explained, we ask for 
an explanation which the continuity of history 

68 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

alone can not afford. An explanation in con- 
temporaneous terms is required. We do not use 
the phrase because our ancestors used it, although 
we may have derived it from them; we use it 
because of its known efficacy. We may, however, 
discover that our ancestors — or Norse parents — 
used it for a different reason, namely, because 
they believed in a language of beasts and birds. 
But if we ask why they so believed, it will not 
profit us to pursue antiquity again, unless by so 
doing we come upon the contemporaneous, exper- 
imental origin of that belief. For it is evident 
that if the belief had an origin, there was a time 
anterior when it did not exist, and its origin can 
not, therefore, be explained solely in terms of 
that anterior time. Its origin points, not to 
continuity, but to action. It indicates not that 
the originators of the belief had ancestors, but 
that, in view of their contemporaneous circum- 
stances, they acted in a certain way. To explain 
the origin of anything, therefore, we can not 
trust to the continuity of history alone. That 
continuity may carry us back to the beginnings 
of beliefs and institutions which have persisted 
and been transmitted from age to age; it may 
reveal to us experimental factors which have 
shaped beliefs and institutions, but which have 

69 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

long since been forgotten; but it can never, of 
itself, reveal the experimental origin of any 
belief or institution whatever. That is, in 
principle, the limitation by which the explanatory 
value of historical continuity is restricted. To 
understand origins we must appeal to the con- 
temporaneous experience of their own age, or to 
experimental science.^ 

Simple as this consideration is, it has been too 
much neglected by historians and philosophers in 
recent times on account of the profound influence 
of the doctrine of evolution. The great service, 
which that doctrine has rendered, has been to 
fix our attention on the evident fact of con- 
tinuity from which our minds had been distracted 
by a too exclusive preoccupation with theories 
of the atomic kind. Through several centuries, 
philosophy had acquired the habit of thinking 
generally in terms of elements and their com- 
pounds, whenever it addressed itself to a con- 
sideration of nature, or of the mind, or of the 
relation between the two. Its principal problem 

1 If space permitted, this same limitation could be abun- 
dantly illustrated from the sciences, especially the biological 
sciences. Thej' have made very clear what an essential differ- 
ence there is between the continuity of living forms and the 
origin of new forms. This difference can be readily appre- 
ciated by comparing a work on "evolution" or "natural 
history" with a work on "experimental biology." 

70 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

was to discover means of connection and unifica- 
tion which might make clear how that which is 
essentially discrete and discontinuous might, 
none the less, be combined into a unity of some 
sort. As it failed, it usually took refuge in the 
opposite idea, and attempted to conceive an 
original unity out of which diversity was gener- 
ated by some impulsion in this initial and primal 
being. Philosophy thus vibrated between the 
contrasted poles of the same fundamental en- 
deavor, between the attempt to combine elements 
into a unity, and the attempt to resolve unity 
into elements. The latter attempt, especially 
in men like Hegel and Spencer, had the advan- 
tage of involving the idea of continuit}^, and be- 
came the controlling philosophical enterprise 
of the latter part of the last century. But it was 
principally the doctrine of evolution or develop- 
ment as set forth by biologists, anthropologists, 
and historians that made the fact of continuity 
convincingly apparent and freed philosophy from 
the necessity of attempting to explain it. Con- 
tinuity became a fact to be appreciated and 
understood, and ceased to be a riddle to be 
solved. The doctrine of evolution thus wrought 
a real emancipation of the mind. 

But this freedom has been often abused. 
71 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

Relieved of the necessity of explaining continuity, 
philosophers, biologists, historians, and even 
students of language, literature, and the arts, 
have been too frequently content to let the fact 
of continuity do all the explaining that needs to 
be done. To discover the historical origins and 
trace the descent of ideas, institutions, customs, 
and forms of life, have been for many the exclu- 
sive and sufficient occupation, to the neglect of 
experimental science and with the consequent 
failure to make us very much wiser in our 
attempts to control the intricate factors of 
human living. If we would appreciate our own 
morals and religion we are often advised to 
consider primitive man and his institutions. If 
we would evaluate marriage or property, we are 
often directed to study our remote ancestors. 
And this practical advice has sometimes taken 
the form of metaphysics. If we wish to know 
the nature of things or to appraise their worth, 
we are told to contemplate some primitive cosmic 
stuff from which everything has been derived. 
Thus man and all the varied panorama of the 
world vanish backward into nebulae, and life 
disappears into the impulse to live. Not trailing 
clouds of glory do we come, but trailing the 
primitive and the obsolete. 

72 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

Such considerations as these have diverse 
effects according to our temperaments. They 
quite uniformly produce, however, disillusion- 
ment and sophistication. That is the usual 
result of inquisitions into one's ancestry. But 
disillusionment and sophistication may produce 
either regret or rebellion. This exaltation of the 
past, as the ancestral home of all that we are, 
may make us regret our loss of illusions and our 
disconcerting enlightenment. It had been better 
for us to have lived then when illusions were 
cherished and vital, than to live now when they 
are exposed and artificial. The joy of living has 
been sapped, and we may cry with Matthew 
Arnold's Obermann 

"Oh, had I lived in that great day!" 

Or disillusionment and sophistication may beget 
rebellion. We may break with the past, scorn 
an inheritance so redolent of blood and lust and 
superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided 
by the discipline of centuries, strive to create 
a new world every day, and imagine that, at 
last, we have begun to make progress. 

But progress is not to be construed in terms 
of a conservatism which is artificial and reac- 
tionary, or of a radicalism which is undisciplined 

73 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

and irresponsible. Conservatism and radicalism 
are, as already indicated, temperamental affec- 
tions which a too exclusive and irrational con- 
templation of our ancestry may produce in us. 
They are born of fear or impatience, and are not 
the legitimate offspring of history. For historical 
continuity, just because it does not of itself 
reveal the experimental origin of any belief or 
institution, does not of itself disclose progress 
or any standard by which progress may be 
estimated. It teaches no lesson in morals and 
provides no guide to the perplexed. And the 
reason for this is simple. History is continuous, 
and, therefore, there is no point, no date, no 
occurrence, no incident, no origin, no belief, and 
no institution, which can claim preeminence 
simply on account of its position. If men were 
once superstitious because of their place in 
history and are now scientific for precisely the 
same reason, we can not therefore conclude, 
with any intelligent or rational certainty, that 
evolution has progressed from superstition to 
science, or that science is better than superstition. 
Values are otherwise determined. The continuity 
of history levels them all. 

Yet there may be laws of history. The com- 
parative study of history, whether the history 

74 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

be of civilizations or of living forms or of geolog- 
ical formations, reveals uniformities and sequences 
which promote our understanding and aid our 
practice. If we should find that wherever men 
have lived, their institutions, laws, customs, 
religion, and philosophy tend to show a uni- 
formity of direction in their development, we 
should feel justified in concluding that the 
tendency indicated a law of history. Yet such 
laws would not be indications of progress. They 
would indicate rather the conditions under which 
progress is or can be made. For laws are 
expressions of the limitations under which things 
may be done. They show the forms and struc- 
tures to which actions conform. But whether 
these actions are good or bad, upward or down- 
ward, progressive or retrogressive, they do not 
show. For decline no less than progress is in 
conformity with law, and the continuity of 
history is indifferent to both. Were we, there- 
fore, in possession of all the laws and uniformities 
of history, w^e should not have discovered thereby 
what either decline or progress is; but were we 
in possession of a knowledge of what decline 
and progress are, the laws and uniformities of 
history would teach us better to avoid the one 
and attain the other. 

75 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

It would seem to follow from these consider- 
ations that progress involves something more 
than the continuous accumulation of results in 
some specified direction, the piling of them up on 
one another in such a way that the total heap is 
more impressive than any of the portions added 
to it, and more illustrative, consequently, of a 
particular career. There might, indeed, be 
progress in this sense, if we divorced the con- 
ception of it from any standard which might 
intelligently judge it and set a value upon it. 
For the passage from seed to fruit, or any 
movement in time which attains an end illustra- 
tive of the steps by which it has been reached 
is in that sense progressive. But progress in 
this sense means no more than the fact of history. 
The career of things in time is precisely that 
sort of movement, and indicates the sense in 
which history is naturally purposeful. To call 
it progress adds nothing to the meaning of it 
unless a standard is introduced by which it can 
be measured. If we will risk again the treacher- 
ous distinction between man as intelligent and 
nature as simply forceful, we may say that 
progress rightfully implies some improvement of 
nature. We should then see that to improve 
nature involves the doing of something which 

76 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

nature, left to herself, does not do, and, conse- 
quently, that nature herself affords no indication 
of progress and no measure or standard of it. 
Nor does history afford them, if we divorce 
history from every moral estimate of it. For 
again, we may say that progress implies some 
improvement of history, so that to judge that 
there has been progress is not to discover that 
history by evolving has put a value upon itself. 
It is rather to judge that history has measured 
up to a standard applied to it. It seems idle, 
therefore, to suppose that history apart from 
such a standard can tell us what progress is or 
whether it has been made. 

Yet history might do so if we are ready to 
admit man makes moral judgments as naturally 
as the sun shines. If his morality were some 
miracle, supernaturally imposed upon his natural 
career, we should need supernatural sanctions 
for it, for no natural achievement of his could 
justify it. These sanctions might justify him 
and what he does, if he conformed to them, 
but neither he nor his actions could give them 
natural warrant. They would express nothing 
after which he naturally aspires, and could, 
consequently, afford him no vision of a goal the 
attainment of which would crown his history 

77 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

with its own natural fruition. But if his moral- 
ity is natural, his ideals and standards of judg- 
ment express what he has discovered he might 
be, and point out to him what his history might 
attain, had he knowledge and power enough to 
turn it in the direction of his own conscious 
purposes. Accordingly his history then might 
reveal both progress and the criterion of it. 
But it would do so not simply because it is a 
history, but because it is a history of a certain 
kind. Man makes progress because he can 
conceive what progress is, and use that concep- 
tion as a standard of selection and as a goal to 
be reached. He participates in his own history 
consciously, and that means that he participates 
in it morally, with a sense of obligation to his 
career. For to be conscious implies the anticipa- 
tion in imagination of results which are not yet 
attained, but which might be attained if appro- 
priate means were found. Conceiving thus what 
he might be, man always has some standard 
and measure of what he is. He sees ahead 
of him. and moves, therefore, with care and 
discrimination. All the forces and impulses of 
his nature do not simply impel him on from 
behind; they also draw him on from before 
through his ability to conceive to what enlarge- 

78 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

ment and fruition they might be carried. He 
condemns his life as miserable, only because he 
conceives a happiness which condemns it; and 
he calls it good, only because joys, once antici- 
pated but now attained, have blessed it. Prog- 
ress is thus characteristic of human history, 
because it is characteristic of man that progress 
should be conceived. His life is not only a life 
of nutrition and reproduction, or of pleasures and 
pains, but a life also of hopes and fears. And 
when hope and fear are not blind, but enlight- 
ened, his life is also a life of reason, for reason 
is the ability to conceive the ends which clarify 
the movements toward them. 

'^ Without reason, as without memory, there 
might still be pleasures and pains in existence. 
To increase those pleasures and reduce those 
pains would be to introduce an improvement into 
the sentient world, as if a devil suddenly died 
in hell or in heaven a new angel were created. 
Since the beings, however, in which these values 
would reside, would, by hypothesis, know noth- 
ing of one another, and since the betterment 
would take place unprayed-for and unnoticed, 
it could hardly be called a progress; and cer- 
tainly not a progress in man, since man, without 
the ideal continuity given by memory and 

79 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

reason, would have no moral being. In human 
progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instru- 
ment, having its sole value in its service to 
sense; such a betterment in sentience would 
not be progress unless it were a progress in 
reason, and the increasing pleasure revealed 
some object that could please; for without a 
picture of the situation from which a heightened 
vitality might flow, the improvement could be 
neither remembered nor measured nor desired." ^ 
Carrying thus the conception and measure of 
progress in his own career, man can judge his 
history morally, and decide what progress he 
has made. He speaks aptly of "making" 
progress, recognizing in that expression that he 
uses the materials at his command for the ends 
he desires. But the materials at his command 
are not of his own making. He may, indeed, 
have modified them by former use, but in each 
instance of his using them they are always so 
much matter with a structure and character of 
their own. This fact puts the continuity of 
history in a new light. It forbids the attempt 
to conceive it as a movement pushing forward, 
as it were, into the future. We should conceive 

^ Santayana, George. "The Life of Reason," 1905. Vol. I, 
pages 3-4. 

80 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

it rather from the point of view of the time 
process as we have already analyzed it. Then 
we should see that the continuity of history is 
the continuity of the results of the conversion of 
the possible into the actual — the part of the 
line which has been drawn. It comprises all 
that has been accomplished, conserved either by 
man's memory or by nature at large, and exist- 
ing for continued modification or use. As such, 
it has its own structure, its own uniformities, 
and its own laws. To them every modification 
made is subject. That is why everything 
"connects on from what lies at hand," and why 
everything we do — even the expressions we 
use — points backward to what our ancestors 
have done. Since what they have done is only 
material for what we may do, it can not of 
itself explain our use of it, or judge our own 
values. An understanding of it should, however, 
make us wiser in the use of it. That is why 
we need contemporaneous experience and em- 
pirical science. We need to discover, either by 
our own experience or by reconstituting the 
experience of others, what happens when 
given material is used in a given way. Such 
discoveries are the only genuine explanations. 
They reveal the conditions to which actions 

81 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

must conform if the ends we desire are to be 
attained. 

More generally expressed the continuity of 
history is the continuity of matter. It comprises 
in sum the structure to which every movement 
in time is subject. It makes up what we call 
the laws of nature conformably to which what- 
ever is done must be done. But in itself it is 
inert and impotent. Activity of some sort must 
penetrate it, if there is to be anything effected. 
And what is effected reveals, when experimentally 
understood, the laws as limitations within which 
the control of any movement is possible. 

A wall is built by laying stone on stone. It 
may be torn down and built again, or left a 
ruin. The placing or overthrow of every stone 
occurs as just that event but once, never to 
return, but the stones, though chiseled or worn 
in the handling, remain constant material for 
constant use. The result is a wall or a ruin, 
both of which illustrate the law of gravitation, 
but neither of which was produced by that law. 
That is what history is like. It is an activity 
which transforms the materials of the world 
without destroying them, and transforms them 
subject to laws of their own. The world is thus 
ever new, but never lawless. It is always fi-esh 

82 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

and always old. The present is, as Francis 
Bacon said, its real antiquity. Time is thus the 
arch-conservative and the arch-radical. For- 
ever it revises its inheritance, but it is never 
quit of it. 

Man's inheritance comprises both what he has 
derived from his ancestors, and also the world 
bequeathed to him from day to day. This 
material he uses with some knowledge of its laws, 
and with the conscious desire to convert it to 
his own ends. The kinds of progress he can 
make are thus relevant to the purposes he sets 
before him. Since the satisfaction of his physical 
needs and the desire of comfortable living re- 
quire some mastery of physical resources, his 
progress can naturally be measured by the degree 
of success he makes in providing for satisfactions 
of this kind. Such progress is material progress, 
and its standards are economy and efficiency, 
or the attainment of the maximum result with 
the minimum of effort. This kind of progress is 
very diversified, embracing all the economic con- 
cerns of life, and much of society and the arts. 
But material prosperity is provisional. To be 
well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed, and even to 
have friends and the opportunity for unlimited 
amusement, these things have never been per- 

83 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

manently regarded as defining human happiness 
to the full. Having these things man is still 
curious to know what he will do. Material 
progress indicates mastery of the necessities of 
his existence in order that he may then be free 
to act. If no free act follows upon such mastery, 
life loses its savor, and pleasures grow stale. 
Material progress would thus seem to be a pre- 
liminary to living well, but would not be living 
well itself. For man would be in a sorry plight 
if he succeeded in mastering the physical re- 
sources of his world, and then found nothing 
to do. 

There seems to be nothing further for him to 
do than to reflect, or rather what he does further, 
flows from his reflections. Since he satisfies his 
bodily wants, not blindly, but consciously and 
through exercise of his intelligence, looking 
before and after, and trying to see his life from 
beginning to end, his reflections lead him to self- 
consciousness. He discovers his personality and 
makes the crucial distinction between his body 
and his soul. He speaks of his world, of his 
friends, of his life. He begins then to wonder for 
what purpose and by what right his possessive 
attitude is warranted; for unless he suppresses 
his reflections or yields himself thoughtlessly 

84 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

to his instincts and emotions, he can not fail 
to observe that things are no more rightfully his 
than another's, and that to belong rightfully 
to any one there must be some warrant drawn 
from a world with which his soul could be 
congenial. Even his soul begins to appear as 
not rightfully his, for why should he have now 
this haunting sense of belonging to another 
world, and of being a visitor to this in need of 
introduction and credentials? Reflection thus 
gives birth to a new kind of life in which also 
progress may be made. We call it rational 
progress, for it involves the attempt to justify 
existence by discovering sanctions which reason 
can approve, and to which all should give assent, 
because each soul must, on seeing them, recog- 
nize them as its own. 

Reflection may lead man to do generous 
things. He may comfort the distressed, help 
the poor, relieve pain, or reform society. The 
world affords him abundant opportunity for 
his benefactions. He may create beautiful 
things which he and others can enjoy perfectly 
in the mere beholding of them. He may worship 
the gods, dimly conscious that they at least 
lead the perfect life, and that to dwell with them 
is immortality. Such exercises of the spirit yield 

85 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

him a new kind of happiness. But his danger lies 
in supposing that his existence can be thus 
externally justified: that others will bless him 
for his benefactions; that Beauty lurks hidden 
to be gloriously seen even at the risk of destruc- 
tion; or that God intended him to be happy. 
If, however, he is saved from thus supersti- 
tiously converting the ideal possibilities of his 
life into justifying reasons why he should exist 
at all, he may see in them the fruition of all 
his history. Even his material progress gives 
him a hint of this, for it is genuine progress and 
justifies itself naturally through the attainment 
of its ends. For he needs no sanction to warm 
his body when cold, or to feed it when hungry. 
It is sufficient that he sees the end to be reached 
and finds the means to reach it. The hunger 
of the soul may be no less efficacious. Although 
these cravings tend to bring uneasiness and 
distaste into his animal enjoyments, they find 
some satisfaction if these enjoyments are ideal- 
ized and transformed into a vision of what 
they might be freed from the material grossness 
which clogs them. Man then begins to conceive 
ideal love and friendship, and an ideal society. 
If only he were the free partaker of such perfect 
things, his existence would need no justification. 

86 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

In acknowledging this, however, he may redis- 
cover himself and learn more adequately what 
the purpose of his history is. It is so to use the 
materials of the world that they will be perma- 
nently used in the light of the ideal perfection 
they naturally suggest. Man can conceive no 
occupation more satisfying and no happiness 
more complete. In entering upon it he makes 
rational progress. Its measure is the degree of 
success he attains in making his animal life 
minister to ideals he can own without reserve 
and love without regret. 

Human history is something more than the 
lives of great men, the rise and fall of states, 
the growth of institutions and customs, the 
vagaries of religion and philosophy, or the 
controlling influence of economic forces. It is 
also a rational enterprise. Expressed in natural- 
istic terms it is history conscious of what history 
is. To remember and to understand what has 
happened is not, therefore, simply an interesting 
and profitable study; it may be also an illustra- 
tion of rational living. It may be an indication 
that man, in finally discovering what his history 
genuinely is, is at the same time making it 
minister constantly and consciously to its own 
enlargement and perfection. That intelligent 

87 



THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY 

beings should recover their history is no reason 
why they should repudiate it, even if they find 
many things of which to be ashamed; for they 
are examples of the recovery of the past with 
the prospect of a future. In reading their 
own history, they may smile at that which once 
they reverenced, and laugh at that which once 
they feared. They may have to unlearn many 
established lessons and renounce many cherished 
hopes. They may have to emancipate them- 
selves continually from their past; but note 
that it is from their past that they would be 
emancipated and that it is freedom that they 
seek. It is not a new form of slavery. Into 
what greater slavery could they fall than into 
that implied by the squandering of their inheri- 
tance or by blaming their ancestors for preceding 
them? They will be ancestors themselves one 
day and others will ask what they have be- 
queathed. These others may not ask for Greece 
again or for Rome or for Christianity, but they 
will ask for the like of these, things which can 
live perennially in the imagination, even if as 
institutions they are past and dead. He is not 
freed from the past who has lost it or who regards 
himself simply as its product. In the one case 
he would have no experience to guide him and 

88 



THE CONTINUITY OF HISTORY 

no memories to cherish. In the other he would 
have no enthusiasm. To be emancipated is to 
have recovered the past untrammeled in an 
enhghtened pursuit of that enterprise of the 
mind which first begot it. It is not to renounce 
imagination, but to exercise it illumined and 
refreshed. 

History is, then, not only the conserving, the 
remembering, and the understanding of what 
has happened: it is also the c^iapleting of 
what has happened. And since in man history 
is consciously lived, the completing of what has 
happened is also the attempt to carry it to 
what he calls perfection. He looks at a wilder- 
ness, but, even as he looks, beholds a garden. 
For him, consequently, the purpose of history 
is not a secret he vainly tries to find, but a kind 
of life his reason enables him to live. As he 
lives it well, the fragments of existence are com- 
pleted and illumined in the visions they reveal. 



89 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

Columbia University in the City of New York 




The Press was incorporated June 8, 1893, to promote the publica- 
tion of the results of original research. It is a private corporation, 
related directly to Columbia University by the provisions that its 
Trustees shall be officers of the University and that the President of 
Columbia University shall be President of the Press. 



The publications of the Columbia University Press include works 
on Biography, History, Economics, Education, Philosophy, Linguistics, 
and Literature, and the following series: 

Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology. 

Columbia University Biological Series. 

Columbia University Studies in Cancer and AlUed Subjects. 

Columbia University Studies in Classical Philology. 

Columbia University Studies in Comparative Literature. 

Columbia University Studies in English. 

Columbia University Geological Series. 

Columbia University Germanic Studies. 

Columbia University Indo-Iranian Series. 

Columbia University Contributions to Oriental History and 
Philology. 

Columbia University Oriental Studies. 

Columbia University Studies in Romance Philology and Liter- 
ature. 



Adams Lectures. 
Julius Beer Lectures 
Blumenthal Lectures. 



Carpentier Lectures. 
Hewitt Lectures. 
Jesup Lectures. 

Catalogues will be sent free on application. 



LEMCKE & BUECHNER, Agents 

30-32 WEST 27th ST., NEW YORK 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 



AN INTRODUCTION TO SYSTEMATIC PHILOSOPHY. By 
Walter T. Marvin, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, 
Rutgers College. 8vo, cloth, pp. xiv + 572. Price, $3.00 net. 

THE REVIVAL OF SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINE- 
TEENTH CENTURY. By Joseph Louis Perrier, Ph.D. 8vo, 
cloth, pp. viii + 344. Price, SI. 75 net. 

PHILOSOPHY. By Nicholas Murray Butler, LL.D., President 
of Columbia University. 12mo, cloth, pp. vii + 51. Price, $1.00 

net. 

A CONTRIBUTION TO A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF HENRI BERGSON. 

Prepared and edited by the Library of Columbia University, with 
an introduction by John Dewey, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia 
University. 16mo, paper, pp. xiii + 56. Price, $ .25 net. 

PSYCHOLOGY. By Robert S. Woodworth, Professor of Psy- 
chology, Columbia University. 8vo, paper, pp. 29. Price, $ .25 
net. 

METAPHYSICS. By Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, Johnsonian 
Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University. 8vo, paper, pp. 26. 
Price, $ .25 net. 

ETHICS. By John Dewey, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia 
University. 8vo, paper, pp. 26. Price $ .25 net. 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LEMCKE (fe BUECHNER, Agents 
30-32 West 27th Street New York City 



